It was through the Episcopal Church that Gibbs left another legacy, one that he hoped would last as long as the Big Ship. In 1960, Gibbs’s old friend, actor Wynn Handman, approached William Francis with the idea of starting a new congregation for the arts community. Not only would it be an active church; it would also be the home of a new arts venue of Handman’s called the American Place Theater. William Francis threw himself into the project, and the renovated St. Clement’s Church, located only a few blocks from the Big Ship’s berth at Pier 86, opened its doors in 1962. The church’s guiding belief was “There will be no outcasts.”30
Next to designing a sister ship for United States, Gibbs’s deep involvement with the Episcopal Church brought him his greatest satisfaction in his later years. Yet as a new decade dawned, he could not help but notice that the public was increasingly traveling to Europe and back by passenger aircraft, something he had brushed off during his entire career.
Gradually, it became clear that United States would not signal a new era of American maritime dominance, but the swan song of a whole way of life on the North Atlantic, one to which William Francis Gibbs had dedicated his life.
And after half a century of intense commitment to the design of ships, William Francis had no choice but to hold on to the Big Ship even as the world changed around him.
“Once such a man as W.F.G. produces a masterpiece,” one observer noted, “he becomes captive to it.”31
The sister ship to United States would never be built. As the 1950s ended, the Big Ship was under attack by her unionized crew and by the jet airplane. It was a fight that even William Francis Gibbs could not win.
28. NO TIME TO SAY GOOD-BYE
During a stormy winter crossing in the late 1950s, Bell Captain Bill Krudener found himself tending to a seasick couple on their honeymoon. They never left their first-class cabin, nor did they stop vomiting. Krudener dutifully cleaned up the mess. As the couple stumbled down the gangplank, the green-faced husband, who had lost about fifteen pounds, glared at him in anger.
“Next time, we are flying!” he said.1
The man’s words signaled a new, unstoppable trend that began on October 4, 1958, when the first commercial jet took off from London’s Heathrow Airport and screeched onto the tarmac of New York’s Idlewild six hours later. With the coming of the jet, travel writer John Malcolm Brinnin observed, “sea travel did not so much decline or diminish as plummet—almost out of sight.”
For the first few years after the arrival of the transatlantic jet in the autumn of 1958, United States somehow continued to carry healthy passenger loads, including a large number of American military personnel traveling to bases in West Germany. “The ship held her passengers well, especially in the summer time,” ship’s photographer Joe Rota recalled. “But when the weather began to deteriorate around October, then we noticed more of a drop.”2
To the old-timers in the ship business, the bleak days of the Great Depression returned when giants such as Leviathan, Mauretania, and Olympic sailed less than half full. But this was different. The world was prosperous, the stock market was soaring, and Americans had money.
In response to the crisis, the shipping companies decided to get rid of the older ships. In 1959, the first of the big old liners went to the scrappers when the French Line disposed of the thirty-one-year-old Ile de France. She was quickly followed by the old flagship Liberté, built in 1929 as the German greyhound Europa.3 Both ships were replaced in 1962 by the giant France, at 1,035 feet the longest liner in the world and capable of sailing at 35 knots. But even the French Line conceded there would be no attempt to capture the Blue Riband from United States.
“Flying has cut down trans-Atlantic travel time so that there is no meaning to surface speed records,” company president Jean Marie told the press, closing the door on more than 120 years of hard-won innovation, as generations of ship designers chased the Blue Riband.4
The Italian Line remained optimistic, commissioning three big new liners in the early 1960s: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raffaello. All were suffused with Italian glamour, style, and heavy government subsidies, but operated in the red as soon as they entered service.
No one, it turned out, could overcome the sudden paradigm shift in transatlantic travel. Even Cunard, with its weekly express duo of the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary, began to stumble financially. By the early 1960s, the two great ships were losing millions of dollars every year. Maintenance cutbacks hurt them as well, transforming them from floating Ritz-Carltons to shabby-genteel hostelries. Their hulls became streaked in rust, brass work dull, luxurious lounges and staterooms dingy. Menus grew shorter and service surlier. “As their final decade drew to its end, the Queens, more often than not, were ghost ships of the Great Circle,” John Malcolm Brinnin wrote. “It was then possible for a single solitary passenger to turn up for tea in the dim depths of the grand saloon and sit, magnificently alone, while a dozen white jacketed stewards stood around like sentries, alert to his command….” The captain’s receptions, populated by dwindling bands of doddering old men and aging dowagers, were “an occasion of uneasy gaiety and an index to despair.”5
As passenger lists declined, labor troubles escalated, and more sailings were canceled or delayed by strikes. Joe Curran’s National Maritime Union refused to allow the United States Lines to lay off crew members when the ship was lightly booked, especially in the winter. “Members felt that the shipping companies were taking advantage of the workers every place they could,” a bellboy recalled, “and they were making a fortune, and if it weren’t for the unions the ship couldn’t sail. Often there was no work for the bell staff. But we had to be there.”6
In June 1958, the ship’s engineering officers, all members of the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association, walked off United States just before she was to set sail with a nearly full complement of passengers. The New York Times reported that the union demanded “a ‘substantial’ wage increase, job security, longer vacations, higher pensions, and minor changes in working rules.” The dispute was resolved only after “what was described as a complete capitulation by the United States Lines in shipboard conferences that began at 10 A.M.—two hours before sailing time.” United States sailed for Europe eight hours late. Passengers made the best of the delay by sunbathing in deck chairs.7
On October 1 of the same year, the members of the International Union of Masters, Mates and Pilots walked off the job, demanding longer vacations. The strike dragged on, and the union refused to budge.
On October 3, a fuming General Franklin called a press conference and announced that for the first time ever, the company would cancel a sailing of United States.
Franklin declared that the negotiations failed “because of impossible demands, including featherbedding.”